How to Carry Retailer Loyalty Cards on Your Smartphone

You’ve seen those women: the ones with the big fat keychain of dozens of grocery and drugstore loyalty cards. No matter where they go shopping, they can whip out the key chain and ring up the savings (they always have coupons, too).

I am not that woman. I lose my cards with alarming frequency. Because I never remember who signed up for the card, I always have to run through three different phone numbers to try to get the discount—(Is it mine? my husband’s? the landline?)—which makes everyone behind me in line just love me, of course.

Thankfully, neither you nor I have to be that woman. It turns out that you can store all your loyalty card information in your smartphone. As long as you have your phone, you have your data.

So how do you do it? The latest apps make storing data on your phone a cinch. Here are four that could work for you:

Cardstar is the most popular and effective app for storing cards on your phone. It takes about fifteen minutes to upload your cards (even less if you already have digital versions of your cards), but once you do, the job is done and your cards will be ready anytime. This app is available in iPhone, Droid, and even Blackberry versions.

If you have an iPhone and recently upgraded your operating system to iOS 6, you already have an app that will store your digital cards. Unfortunately, I have found that Passbook is fairly buggy so it doesn’t seem to be much use unless the store you prefer is one of Apple’s partners.

Initially, Lemon was a service that simply allowed you to snap photos to store your cards and receipts, but now they’ve created an API (data sharing) platform that allows stores and companies to easily create digitized versions of their cards.

Science fiction movies have shown people using a single object (ranging from a barcode to a chip implanted in their arms and more) as a way to travel, make payments, and prove identity. With the advent of all these new tools on your smartphone, we might not be too far away from only having to carry just one device to do just about anything: get discounts, make payments, check our email, and make phone calls today. Now, if only a smartphone could also carry my lipstick…